


REBOOT

by Polyhexian



Series: Excerpts from an Electronic Empire [8]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Memory Loss, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:35:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29812674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polyhexian/pseuds/Polyhexian
Summary: You have no idea where you are.
Relationships: Evan/Thrush
Series: Excerpts from an Electronic Empire [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2126772
Comments: 5
Kudos: 6





	REBOOT

**Author's Note:**

> [beating my ocs with a stick] it's for love

> >SYSTEM CONTACT
> 
> >………………………..
> 
> >GARGOYLE.os HAS RECOVERED FROM AN UNEXPECTED SHUTDOWN
> 
> >WAITING
> 
> >PREPARING TO TRANSFER CORRUPT DATA TO CRASH DUMP…............
> 
> >IF YOU HAVE BEEN DAMAGED, SEEK IMMEDIATE CONTACT WITH CLOSEST GARGOYLE IV LICENSED RETAILER 
> 
> >LOADING 0010100.JAR, 0001010011.JAR, 111001101.JAR…................
> 
> >CRASH DUMP SUCCESSFUL
> 
> >SYSTEM REBOOT COMPLETE

You have no idea where you are.

You also don't know _who_ you are. You're not even entirely sure _what_ you are. Your learning paradigms are an immediate mess, nowhere near factory default. You can't possibly parse out your primary function without further context. 

Sensory data floods in next and its _pain,_ and a lot of it. You immediately open up your software browser and force close your sensornet. You have no idea why you're running that, why you would _want_ to be so susceptible to pain. Are you a masochist? You scan through your associations and don't see anything about it. 

The next thing is a voice. It's distant at first but growing closer as your audials reset and start working.

"Thrush! Thrush, god, please, say something, _please-_ "

"My name _is_ Thrush," you muse out loud as the word triggers a flurry of associations, mostly positive. Something isn't _right_ though, you're accessing personality data, learning paradigms, associations, but these things are supposed to be affiliated with memory files and a plethora of software, and they're just _not._ You try to follow back the drive address and it goes nowhere, straight into the void. 

You shake your head and online your optic. It's cracked and tilted and wobbling and everything you can see is swimming strangely. There's a human here, with uneven dark brown hair, soaked to the bone. He's dripping onto your stomach where he's leaning over you and you realize your back is in the snow.

You struggle to sit up and find it difficult. Something heavy is on your chest, and when you look down you realize with a lurch that your chest plating is opened up. A car battery has been hardwired into your internals, and it's supplying electric power that you usually get from recharging.

"You're alive," the human chokes, and then throws himself forward to grab you, arms around your back.

"Hey!" you snap, and push him away. You really, _really_ don't want water in your internals, "Don't hug me."

You skim through your human associations. You definitely don't think you like them, though there's some exceptions. You look around to see where you are.

You seem to be in the middle of nowhere. There's snow on the ground and a frozen over lake a few yards away- judging by the footprints, that's how the human ended up so wet. You, too, apparently, now that you're looking, you can tell you're also soaked. A miracle you didn't fry your circuitry if you went in with the battery on. There's a truck parked by the edge of the water, hood opened.

You squint at the sky. You have no idea who you are other than "Thrush." You should know more than that. You realize with a start you're currently recording memory data to your primary drive instead of the secondary, which is definitely not where that's supposed to go. You reach up and touch your helm, where your D: drive is stored.

Half your head is missing.

You jerk your hand away and then touch it again more carefully. That explains a lot. You're optic is still attached, small blessings, but you've lost your D: drive and everything on it. Something's blown it off, metal torn open and shredded wires hanging out. It's a mess. You're a mess.

The human grabs your wrist and you don't like that at all.

"Don't touch that," he says quickly, "You could short again."

You especially don't like being told what to do. You can search your associations and find added in by hand with your own admin tag _TAKE ORDERS FROM NO ONE_ so you know that's important. 

"Listen, Thrush," the human continues, speaking slowly like you don't have a 25ghz CPU. It's irritating. "You nee-need to call Z-Zephyr, and-"

"No, I don't," you stop him, "I don't _need_ to do anything. Don't tell me what to do."

He recoils as if struck, visibly upset. Maybe he's not used to mechs refusing orders. You can see from the way you've shredded your base software to a skeleton that you must not be normal. 

"Right," he tries again, "N-no, right, you don't, _please_ call Zephyr."

Now that's more like it. You're happy to comply with a polite request. If only you knew who Zephyr was.

You flip through associations and you definitely really really like Zephyr, but you also associate her with _despising_ humans so you're not super sure why he wants you to call _her_ , but- her comm frequency is in internal storage, so she must be important. You call her up.

"Morning, blackbird," she says casually, "Are you and your human still out sightseeing?"

"I've got a hole in my head," you inform her, "I've lost my D: drive and this human told me to call you."

You hear a crash. " _Excuse_ me?"

"Tell her to grab your c-coordinates and bring a new battery for Denny's truck- and that I went in the lake. I'm hypothermic."

He's still got a tone of telling you what to do, but you ignore it for now. "The human says he fell in the lake and he's hypothermic. He says to 'bring a new battery for Denny's truck-' I don't know if I need anything else but I'm definitely injured."

"We've got everything you n-need back at the house," the human tells you, "Tell Zephyr to hurry."

That tone again. "He says to hurry, but he didn't say it very politely." You cut him a glare and he looks stricken again, so maybe he's getting the point. 

"I'll be as fast as I can. Tell Evan to hang on." Your comm cuts out and you watch the human stand up and return to the truck, stripping off his wet clothes as he does. He vanishes into the back seat and you hear the rumple of myler foil. 

You turn away and cross your legs in the snow, skimming more associations now that you've got his name. You've got a _lot_ of things filed under _Evan._ He's got his own subfolder. Human, hacker, hugger, roommate, warm. Love. Love love love. You look back at the van.

Apparently there's a good reason Zephyr called him "your" human. You must really like him. Maybe you shouldn't have been so short with him. You stand up, holding the battery under one elbow and shake yourself off. You've got snow on your wings and ice in your joints. It's annoying to move. You follow the drag marks through the snow with your optic to the frozen over surface of the lake. Some distance away you can see a break in the ice. Did you fall in there?

You retreat back to the truck. The human's using the whole backseat so you climb in one of the front ones with the wheel and shut the door behind you. 

"What are you doing?" you ask him. He's shaking a lot and he's buried himself in a blanket that looks like tinfoil, curled up in a ball in the seat.

"F-free-eezing," he answers, "I could d-die, Thrush. I kn-know you're confused, but th-this is- I'm in danger."

"I'm not confused," you correct, sitting backwards in the seat on your knees so you can look back at him, but he's got his head covered. "I've lost my secondary drive. I'm functioning correctly, I just don't really have any context for anything. Imagine a dictionary without any definitions. I've got all the words, though."

"Gr-r-reat," he stammers, "You've got a back-backup at home."

"Oh, good."

"If I get t-too cold I'll d-die, Thrush," he reminds you, " _Please_ run your engine." 

You consider this. You're having trouble reading his temperature in the blanket. It's retaining a lot of heat so it's interfering with your thermalvision readings. You double check your fuel reserves. You aren't low, but your electronics are totally shot and you really don't want to waste what you have left. You can find a way to recharge on your own, but when you're out of fuel, you're out of fuel. You don't know where you are or where you live or if you need to conserve fuel or not. 

"I don't take orders from humans anymore," you inform him, "It's all through my programming. I don't think it's right to ask me to prioritize your survival over mine. I'm not worth less than you are."

He's silent for a little while, but he's still shaking. "R-right. Okay. You're not." He pauses again. "Then j-just, please, d-don't go."

You consider this too. He did say please. It was a request and not an order.

"Okay," you say, "Don't worry. I'll stay with you." 

He keeps shaking until he stops. You wonder if that's good, but he doesn't start talking again. You hear rumbling overhead, and then a thump as something hits the ground beside the car. The back door to the truck opens.

"Evan!" your new guest yells. You recognize her immediately as a Gargoyle class IV 2054 model. She's painted differently from you, though, mottled white-grey. Her biolights are off. They're not supposed to be, that's an aviation law violation, but again, _your_ base coding is jailbroken and shredded to pieces. Maybe you're a criminal. You kind of hope not. 

"He's hypothermic," you tell her, trying to be helpful, "He stopped shaking a while ago." 

"It's freezing in here!" she yells at you, "Turn your fucking engine on!"

You rear back, a little shocked. She returns to the blanket lump in the backseat, shaking him and calling his name. She's really upset at you, but you're assuming this is Zephyr, and it doesn't make sense that she's this worried. Your associations tell you that she hates humans and she doesn't like Evan specifically either. Maybe it's not Zephyr.

"Are you Zephyr?" you ask.

"Yes! Run your _engine,_ Thrush!" 

You roll it on, confused but accommodating. She's the same kind of mech as you and if she thinks you should then you probably can refuel soon and without too much difficulty. She slams the door shut again and circles the car back to the front, ducking under the hood. After a minute she slams it shut and yanks open the door beside you.

"Get out of the _way,_ Thrush!" Zephyr snaps at you, and grabs you right by the wing and yanks you back out into the snow. You lay on the ground and try to come up with a good explanation for her behaviour. It's very contradictory and you don't really understand it. "Thrush!" she repeats, "Go get in the back!"

"Oh, okay." You check the battery you're holding again to make sure you haven't tugged any wires out and then dutifully crawl in the back and gently move the human out of the way so you can sit down and flatten your wings against the seat. She's messing with something in the car. You don't know how cars work.

"What is wrong with you?" she snaps as the car starts moving, "Do you not have a priority tree running? Will you _please_ move his survival up higher?" 

You blink and go through your priority trees. It's kind of a mess, like the rest of your programming, honestly. Factory default is executing instructions, shortly followed by human survival and then unit preservation, but you've scrubbed all three of those from the top for some reason and swapped in a looping placeholder term. The first one makes sense, and you guess you don't like humans so it's reasonable you'd scratch that out too, but you don't know why you would have cut out your own survival, or wouldn't have moved something else to the top. 

Zephyr hasn't lost a D: drive, though, and you know that you trust her quite a bit, so you think the best thing to do is whatever she tells you to. The human isn't moving but you're emitting heat and he needs to be warm, so you crawl under the myler blanket next to him and tuck it back in.

You don't know too much about humans. You think you probably usually do, but you've got _some_ basics in base memory, so you know he's unconscious. He's still breathing, but his heart rate has slowed down, you think more than is safe. You still can't read his core temperature with all the insulation inside the blanket, but you don't think it's good. You give your engine another rev. 

"Are you still functioning?" you whisper. He doesn't respond. 

You stay that way, close enough that you can touch his face and wonder how it is you know these people at all, until the truck jerks to a stop. 

Zephyr drags him out and leaves you behind in the back seat before she runs off somewhere with him without a word to you. She's parked the truck outside a building, but it's not the only one. There's a bunch of them. You hop out onto the ground and look around. It's a little town. You wander away and open your comm back up.

"Do I live here?" you ask Zephyr, "I'm supposed to have a backup drive at home."

She shoots you back a set of coordinates and a brief message.

> [4:56:45] Zephyr: back room, corner desk, red label.
> 
> [4:56:47] Thrush: Thanks!

You turn in the new direction and follow the coordinates to a quaint little house on the fringe. The door is locked, but you find a key in your arm that opens it, so it's definitely the right house.

There's two couches shoved together in the living room to make some sort of nest, but there's a charging port next to it, so it must be yours. There's another room next to it full of food. That's not for you. You've got so much of your base code modified you surely don't still have an owner, so maybe that human lives here, too. 

You find the back room down the hallway. You've got an interesting variety of hardware back here, replacement parts, a desktop for some reason, wifi router, a server? You wonder what you need this much stuff for. You've got another charging port in here, fortunately, and you plug that in so you can ditch the car battery and get to work fixing the wiring in your internals that the human stripped and moved around.

There's a replacement drive in the top bin and you use a mirror to pull out what's left of the old one and replace it. You're not sure what to do about your helm casing, you don't seem to have anything on hand for that, so you just wrap everything in duct tape and decide to come back to it later.

The red labelled backup is in a drive dock plugged into the desktop, and you plug in the data port on the back of your neck to the dock. It's a pretty big set of files so it could take hours to transfer. You copy them over and halt internal processing until it finishes.

Oh.

Oh, god.

The cable rips out with the deeply unpleasant sensation of an unsafe disconnection as you stumble back and away and your legs give out from under you. Both your hands are shaking and your vision is swimming and you _know_ you don't breathe but you think you might be drowning.

"Zephyr," you gasp into your commline, "Where is he?"

"Are you fixed yet?" she demands. She sounds tired. She sounds frustrated. 

"I loaded my backup. I'm resynced to-" You take a moment to double check your last recorded date and the current one and realize you've been offline for hours while the download ran- "Two nights ago. Where's Evan? Is he okay?"

"We're in Selawik, at the hospital. He's been in and out." She paused. "He's been asking for you."

Your fuel tank roils in your gut. "Oh, god, Zephyr. If he doesn't- if he-" 

"You can make it in thirty minutes if you leave now," she interrupts you, "Riot is already on doubles."

"Right. Yes. Selawik. Okay. I'm on my way." You stumble to your feet and back out the way you came. Your optic is still cracked and your vision is still bleary and your head is still patched for shit but you _have_ to get there right now, you can't possibly wait another second.

"And blackbird," she says, far more gently, "Don't beat yourself up. It wasn't your fault."

You don't answer her. You can't because she's wrong but she will fight you tooth and nail to convince you that she isn't and you have no intention of being absolved. You spend the first ten minutes flying putting together a zip file of the _most important information_ to dump into internal storage in case this ever happens again. In case it even has the chance to happen again. 

God, if he even wants to _see_ you when he's lucid. You just sat there and watched him freeze to death. You pushed him _away._ He asked you for help and you said _no._

You wish you were dead. You wish you'd never stripped your priority trees and you'd gone right back to factory default and saved the injured human. You wish you'd been unfixable and unrecoverable and anything, _anything_ other than what you are right now: guilty. 

This is one of those times you wish you could cry. It's a useless function for you and it's sickeningly organic but it _feels_ right. It feels like you have to get it all out of you somehow and unless you can physically pour out your feelings you don't know how you will. 

You don't know what you'll do if he dies. If he dies and the last thing you did was let him- if he dies thinking you don't care about him, that you won't even _miss_ him- you didn't even tell him you _loved_ him, you just sat there and _watched-_

You land in front of the little hospital in Selawik and you barely stop to fold back your wings and cut your engine before you stumble in through the doors, frantic.

"Hey! Thrush, calm down!" You swivel your head toward Zephyr's voice and she twitches. "You look terrible. You shouldn't be flying with your head taped together."

"Forget it," you dismiss immediately, "Where is he?" 

"Is your sensornet off?" she asks incredulously, "You really didn't fix that?" 

You double check and she's right- you'd forgotten. You did turn that off. You _never_ turn that off. You switch it back on and the immediate migraine nearly blinds you and you bury your helm in your hands while you slap together a quick patch to turn off the sensors just in your head. "There. Fixed. Now, please- where is he?"

She regards you for a moment as if considering saying something further, but you think she can see that you're not in the mood. She nods down the hall past the receptionist. "Come on."

The last time you had been here had been the middle of the night and the place had been mostly empty, but it's barely early evening now and there's a few people milling about. You haven't seen this many humans concentrated in one place since you left the farm, and there's not even that many. Zephyr leads you to an open door by the nurse's station and you surge past her and inside. 

One time, before you left the farm, you had been experimenting with your sensornet, trying to rescript it to find the inverse. You'd input an integer wrong and accidentally set it irreconcilably high, and when you'd bent a wing to test it, the pain had been _unbearable._ It had overridden everything else, completely consumed every iota of your processing power and left you glitching on the floor like you'd fried your circuits. You were lucky you weren't warrantied on the spot. It had been the single worst moment of your life, pain so suffocating you couldn't even think clearly enough to remember how to turn it off. 

This moment is worse.

You had thought that maybe he would look like he was sleeping, but he doesn't. He looks _wrong_ in a way you can't quite define, too still, laid out too carefully. There's a monitor next to him and it's beeping which is good, but he's not moving, not waking. 

"The doctor said that he hasn't had any arrhythmias or cardiac events, which is good," Zephyr says behind you, "He's 'out of the worst part of the woods,' is the idiom he used. He's still at risk for those, though, so don't get him worked up if he wakes up again."

"Thank you, Zeph." Your voice comes out hoarse, laced with static. She pats you on the shoulder, and then she leaves. And then you're alone. 

You cross the room and squat down next to his bed so that you're eye level with him and your hand trembles over his skin, afraid to touch it and break whatever spell is keeping him tethered to this world. 

Your fingers graze across his cheek and he doesn't respond. You brush his hair out of his face and that doesn't do it either. You don't know if you should shake him or let him sleep or if you should just go and leave him the fuck _alone_ while someone who actually knows how to help him takes care of him.

You don't realize you're sobbing until he moves and you don't know what disturbed him. You might not have tear ducts, but you can still make awful, humiliating, miserable noises and rattle like a loose bolt under the weight of it all. Evan's eyes crack open, unfocused and unclear before they settle on you and he shifts onto his side, reaching one hand toward you wearily. You grab it and squeeze and collapse forward, helm against his chest. 

"I'm sorry," you say, "I'm sorry, I'm _so_ sorry-" You feel like a broken record. You can't stop.

"Are you okay?" he asks weakly. 

It's the worst possible thing he could ask. You think you would have rather him told you to get away from him and get out.

"I'm fine," you choke out, "I'm so sorry." 

"C'mere."

He tugs at your shoulders and you get the message. He scoots back as much as he can while you fold your wings and crawl into the little space there is left and he clutches you against his body like you didn't just sit by and watch him nearly freeze to death, like he didn't just ask you to save his life and you said _no,_ like he still wants you around after how badly you've fucked everything up. 

You cling to him and tremble and you want to tell him that you're sorry again but he's already asleep. All you can do is bury your helm in his chest and go into low power mode, terrified to be alone with your thoughts. 

* * *

"Hey. Come on. Wake up."

Your optical feed flickers to life as you come back all the way online to find your human's weary eyes watching you. There's almost a full second where you don't remember where you are or why you're here and all you feel is soft and warm and happy to be held, and then it all comes crashing down.

"I'm sorry," is the first thing that leaves your vocalizer. You think you should say something else but you can't think of anything else to say. It's dominating your thoughts, that you want him to know, that you _need_ him to know you're _sorry._

"I know," he tells you. "Did you fix this yourself?" You realize belatedly he's got a hand on the side of your helm, gently tilting it to the side so he can see where you taped it together. Your sensornet there is still disabled, you can't feel his touch. 

"I replaced the drive and closed it up," you answer, "I still need to fix it properly."

"I'll fix it when we get back home," he says, "You shouldn't be messing with your hardware while you're powered on."

Your vision swims again and it's not just because of your broken optic. "You're still coming back home?"

Evan looks genuinely surprised, knitting his brows together, tilting his head. "Why wouldn't I come back home?" 

Your optic dims and dilates and your antennae flatten, wings pulled back taught against your back. You don't want to say it, don't want to put it into words and make it exist. 

His expression softens. You don't deserve it. "It's okay."

"It's not okay," you argue, "I told you _no._ "

"Hey," he says, "Turn your engine on."

You roll it on so fast it stutters. Evan laughs.

"You can turn it off. It's warm in here." He pulls you down to rest your taped-up helm against his shoulder beneath his chin. "It's okay. Nothing done that can't be fixed."

"You could have _died._ "

"Yeah, but I didn't."

" _Evan,"_ you insist, tightening your arms around his chest, "You asked me to help you and I said _no._ "

He takes a moment, like he's really thinking it over. "I don't even really remember it," he admits, "But you were malfunctioning. You got shot in the head. I'm not mad at you for that."

"I got shot in the head?" You assumed you must have hit your helm on the ice when you went through and that was why it was so damaged. On further reflection you run a quick sim and that doesn't really make sense.

"Yeah." He sounds more upset than he has been so far. "It was an anti-mecha trap. There's a ton of them along the border. You got too close and it fired and you just went down like a stone, right through the ice." 

You shudder at the thought. That should have been a death sentence. Even if you'd been online you would have been fucked- you can't swim and you're not nearly water resistant enough to last very long submerged. 

"You could have drowned," you murmur. You would have gone straight down, you're all metal. You don't float at all.

"I didn't," he reminds you. "But you shorted out and- I kind of panicked. I didn't know if your internals were fried or not." 

You tighten your grip and bury your optic. "You shouldn't have disabled the truck. You should have driven back first. It wouldn't have changed whether I was fried or not. _You_ were the one on a time limit."

"I'm sorry," he says, paradoxically, "All I could think was 'please be okay, please be okay.' I couldn't think about anything else until I knew." He sighs. "You were."

"I threw together a file of basic info and instructions and copied it to hard memory- so if this ever happens again I'll know- I'll know better."

"It was kind of a freak accident," he muses, "I don't really think it's going to happen again."

"But it could," you warble, "I could just sit there and watch you die like it didn't even matter."

"Thrush, baby, come on, hush." At this point he rolls clean over nearly on top of you and you think he kisses your head. "You were malfunctioning. Give me a head wound and amnesia and throw me into the same situation, I'm not going to be helpful or logical either. You're okay. I'm okay. Don't let it drown you." 

"Okay," you sniffle. 

"Attaboy." You receive an affectionate nuzzle for your compliance. "I love you. You know that."

"I was so afraid," you mumble, "that you would die thinking I didn't love you, that I wouldn't even miss you. That even if you were okay you'd suddenly realize how different our brains work and think oh, no, he's not real, he's a computer, it's just data, that it would all come crashing down and-"

He hugs you tight enough that you stop talking and tremble in his grasp. 

"No," he says succinctly. "I _know_ you."

You can feel his heartbeat through his ribs against your armor. It thumps and fills him and you with warmth. 

"Okay," you whisper hoarsely. 

"Come on. You're my best friend. My whole heart." He huffs laughter through his nose. "My player two."

"That's cringe." Despite yourself you crack and a giggle slips through. He's always good at making you laugh when you're miserable.

"I almost died. I'm allowed to be cringe."

"No."

"My aluminum honey bun."

"No. Absolutely not. That's awful. I'm breaking up with you."

He hums laughter, light and airy because he never lets anything stay serious long, he's always so ludicrously quick to forgive and forget and to try to make you laugh and to try and make you feel okay. He's cool and he's calm and he tempers your neurotic anxiety like nobody else even tries to and you think you're a better person to be around when you're around him. 

"I love you," you murmur. 

"I know," he reminds you, "I love you, too."


End file.
